The "wisdom of crowds" is the most ridiculous statement I've heard in my life.

Yeah I said it.

Crowds are not wise. There is wisdom in crowds but you have to search to find it. If you ask an obscure question to a million people, odds are at least one person knows the answer to it. This however does not make the crowd wise.

Crowds don't make decisions very well. Try asking 10 friends where they want to go to dinner, see how long it takes to reach a decision. Eventually someone just decides and everyone goes. That's how social media works too.

The decisions crowds make aren't necessarily right. Just because everyone wants something doesn't mean it's a good idea. Such as the crusades, slavery, the holocaust, and Everybody Loves Raymond.

Digg has a porn filter. Why? Because they needed it. Consider the ramifications that one fact has for crowdsourced news. My local newspaper website tells me what the most popular stories of the day are but they might as well just replace that with every article they write about Kentucky Basketball because it's the same list of stories. One day UK Coach John Calipari cut down a tree in his front yard, it became the most popular article on their website. Does that mean it's also the most important? Absolutely not.

For some damn reason or other there's this lingering idea out there that the Internet is somehow fostering a global utopian democracy where everyone participates, no one is left out, and the right decision is always reached through reasoned debate and consensus.

Seriously?

The real question should be why no one else is calling bullshiat on this.

Fark isn't legacy media and we don't have shareholders. So I can say it. I don't have venture capitalists who can tell me to stop.

I've said it before too, and whenever I say it to a room full of journalists I get smiles and nodding heads. They all know it. It's probably the worst kept secret on the Internet.

The real power in social media happens when that one person in a million comes up with an awesome idea, and those who can do so kick it to the front of the line. Speeding up this process is the next great advance in social media. Some will probably call this Web 3.0.

Good luck with the editors -- legacy publishing is still undervaluing and firing them. They figure that it is good enough for outsourcers to copy edit the typos of any manuscript that comes in, hope it is relevant and go.

Isn't Fark basically crowdsourcing, with editors? I think stuff like wikipedia has worked quite well, if not astoundingly well. Look at any scientific article on wiki, and it flat out beats the shiat out of the science 'journalism' in the NYT/ect. Just because it's not perfect doesn't mean it's not 100% better than the alternative...

For some damn reason or other there's this lingering idea out there that the Internet is somehow fostering a global utopian democracy where everyone participates, no one is left out, and the right decision is always reached through reasoned debate and consensus.

The biggest reason the "wisdom of crowds" is shiat is because most of the human race is retarded compared to people like me. Remember how Forrest Gump was a bumbling dumb-ass who didn't really understand anything? That's what I see surrounding me every single farking day and it's enough to make me weep.

I'd like to know why there's a really lame headline like this almost every week, and it always gets insta-greenlit. If I tried to submit this, it would go red before I could even hit the submit button.

Molavian:The biggest reason the "wisdom of crowds" is shiat is because most of the human race is retarded compared to people like me. Remember how Forrest Gump was a bumbling dumb-ass who didn't really understand anything? That's what I see surrounding me every single farking day and it's enough to make me weep.

I'll have to say that the second biggest one, then, is the diffusion of responsibility that crowds offer themselves, leaving little or no accountability for individual actions.

For some damn reason or other there's this lingering idea out there that the Internet is somehow fostering a global utopian democracy where everyone participates, no one is left out, and the right decision is always reached through reasoned debate and consensus.

Molavian:The biggest reason the "wisdom of crowds" is shiat is because most of the human race is retarded compared to people like me. Remember how Forrest Gump was a bumbling dumb-ass who didn't really understand anything? That's what I see surrounding me every single farking day and it's enough to make me weep.

Drew is right, of course. Millions of people are morons. What needs to happen is someone to step up, take charge, and put things in order exactly the way they see fit. All people are good for is promoting the ideas of the leader to the rest of the sheep.

I think Drew would join me in saying that what the internet needs, indeed what this entire generation needs, is another Adolph Hitler.

What the wisdom of crowds is supposed to mean is that in some cases non-expert crowds collective decisions are often more accurte than single-individual expert-driven decisions. This is not valid for lots of things but is surprisingly effective for other things.

There is a decent summary of this on the Wikipedia, including criticisms of the method and its limitations - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds

Good luck with the editors -- legacy publishing is still undervaluing and firing them. They figure that it is good enough for outsourcers to copy edit the typos of any manuscript that comes in, hope it is relevant and go.

Wow, you got Drew's comments and the Kim K wax figure thing in one line. +1 for you and your geo teacher.

Radiolab on NPR did a segment on the intelligence of crowds. If you get a bunch of people to, say, guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, the average of the guesses is always more accurate than any individual guess. The first guy to study this phenomenon was the same guy who founded the eugenics movement. It didn't groove with his theory that common people are dumb, but he published his results anyways.

It depends on how the wisdom is aggregated. If you have ten friends deciding on a place for dinner, nine of whom are shy and one with a voice like a foghorn, then Mr. Foghorn will win. In that case, it isn't the wisdom of crowds, it's the wisdom of loud people.

If instead you get a million people, each of whom anonymously ranks restaurants in order of preference in the privacy of their own home, with appropriate safeguards against ballot stuffing, then you can get pretty good results by looking at the Kemeny/Condorcet order, Borda score, or Range score.

Molavian:The biggest reason the "wisdom of crowds" is shiat is because most of the human race is retarded compared to people like me. Remember how Forrest Gump was a bumbling dumb-ass who didn't really understand anything? That's what I see surrounding me every single farking day and it's enough to make me weep.

What would you call about 30 people running bot-nets to harass two gaming companies, a film studio and eight different web sites which contain forums for the game common to all?

Jon Smedley called it market research and destroyed a two hundred thousand player community. We refer to such assholes as 1%ers, however they're more commonly less than 1/100th of a percent.

In the near future we're going to see a second example, an aftershock if you will, of what happens when you listen to groups who insist they are the only opinion that matters. The Old Republic is starting to show exactly what those 30 people demanded over and over by spam bot and ragepost. Inept narrow design and a game too easy to play.

As to "editing"... The one thing largely missing from the internet in general is true emotion, displayed in forms of writing and seen also in how disturbed from baseline a person's accuracy in punctuation and spelling becomes. With editing you lose a great deal of contact with the intent of many posts and also commonly gain too much emotional feel from very poorly written posts that rely on spell checkers. There are times when a statement must be made in the heat of emotion in order for it to gain validity.